Blog

On Sunday, some of the UK's leading building performance experts joined Dr Wolfgang Feist and Witta Ebel of the Passivhaus Institute, visiting some of our latest domestic and non-domestic Passivhaus projects in London. The purpose of the visits was to review the last 12 months of data analysis and inspect the live data that is being produced, in order to check if Passivhaus is working in the UK climate.

A lot of heat is lost from buildings in winter through simple bathroom mechanical extract fans. Furthermore, people all over the UK suffer from cold drafts and heat loss caused by primitive ventilation grilles in the outside walls of their house. This thermal image of a house next to our Passfield Drive retrofit, illustrates the terrible heat loss that occurs in such houses before renovation, even though it seems that everyone in the street has tried to board and tape over the ventilation grilles! (see picture below).

Enjoying the sun at the start of spring, bere:architects have broken out of the office and begun using the garden furniture again! Our hot lunches are supplied daily by Mother Earth, a London based health food store located down the road. This is the perfect time of year to be outside to appreciate the new growth from the roof top plants bursting into life and the birds feeding from the numerous feeders dotted around the terrace.

Ecobuild’s renowned seminar programme offers more than 130 sessions covering the most pressing and important issues for built environment professionals. With the emphasis throughout on delivering practical and applied information, each seminar is structured to provide key learning points, supported by case studies, analysis, and examples of best practice.Justin Bere, Sarah Lewis and Nick Newman from bere:architects are all speaking in various sessions. Seminars at Ecobuild are free to attend and available on a first come, first served basis.

At the end of its first Winter, these results are better than we would have dared hope for. Mayville Community Centre is also performing better than design, although it should be noted that these results are preliminary as not all the offices have been fully occupied.

Making Building Design’s Top 50 UK Green Leaders at number 49, Justin has been recognised by his industry peers as an early leader in the adoption of the Passivhaus standard in the UK, with his work on affordable Passivhaus standard homes noted as “promising to be particularly valuable”.

"A large part of our work is aimed at helping governments turn pledges to reduce carbon emissions into action through replicable and scalable projects that can be tailored to local conditions. This approach is unique and serves several important functions, including demonstrating how targets can be met in practice, informing further policy decisions, and compressing the timeframe of achieving real emissions reductions. It is no longer an option to wait for an internationally agreed upon roadmap before devising and implementing projects that could be delivered today."